Mozart year ends with a flourish as new score premiered

By Ivonne Marschall Dec 29, 2006, 15:24 GMT

Vienna - Austria's Mozart anniversary year was set to end with an unexpected flourish Friday with the first performance in modern times of a newly-discovered youth work by the great composer.

The sensational discovery which organizers and music lovers could not have dreamt of was being presented in Mozart's birth city of Salzburg.

A Salzburg archivist discovered the previously unknown piano score penned by the young Mozart - a 91-bar 'Allegro di Wolffgango Mozart' found in an antique book of sheet music, recently acquired by the arch-episcopal archives in Salzburg.

The book, dating from the mid-18th century, contains 118 works compiled by two authors, among them early works by Mozart and other composers, archive head Ernst Hintermaier said, adding: 'It will be difficult to pass this one up as fake.'

A fake was unlikely, Hintermaier argued, because back in the 1760s nobody would have benefited from claiming a work by the yet unknown young Mozart.

A later-period origin could also be ruled out, owing to research on the origin of the paper, and the fact that one of the two authors, a musician working in Salzburg in the middle of the 18th century, could be tracked down with a high degree of certainty.

Next to the work, an Allegro written when Mozart was aged between six and ten, the book contains piano adaptations made by Mozart for his violin sonata KV 7 and a previously unknown version of a composition made during his visit to London.

The music sheets also contain compositions by Joseph and Michael Haydn and Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf.

The second author of the book, which was probably used for piano lessons, could not yet be determined, but a close connection to the Mozart family was likely. One possible candidate was Wenzel Hebelt, a violinist and colleague of Mozart's father, Leopold.

While Mozart's authorship of the Allegro is highly likely, his authorship of a second piece in the book, a more complex 'Aria', was set to be the subject of heated discussion among researchers, Mozart expert Christoph Grosspietsch from the International Mozarteum Foundation said at a press conference on Friday.

'It could be by Mozart, but then again, it does not have to be. There a lot of research is still needed,' Grosspietsch said.

The sheet music was acquired by the Salzburg archived a few months ago from a private seller. It is assumed that it originates from the church library of a small village.

It is yet undecided if the newly-discovered Allegro will be added to the updated version of a complete edition of Mozart's work, or whether it will receive its own number in the Koechel catalogue, the bible of all Mozart researchers.